BumbleBeeBum Diapers

The Flats Challenge is over, but I have fallen in love with using flats will continue to use them in my stash. I am going to continue the flats love here on the blog with a series of flats reviews over the next few weeks. First up today is a unique flat made by BumbleBeeBum Diapers. Grace, the owner and maker of BumbleBeeBum Diapers, sent me a Daddy Flat and two matching wipes to review. 

BumbleBeeBums Diapers sells adorable handmade wool soakers, fleece soakers, longies, and custom Daddy Flats. I loved the adorable Handmade With Love bumble bee card that came with the diaper!

When I first heard about Daddy Flats I was really intrigued. Basically these are a flat diaper that has been cut and sewn to be easy to fold and put on your baby. As a cloth diaper addict, I just love that the Daddy Flat pattern has a decorative layer so that you can get cute prints on your flats.

The Daddy Flat has wings built in to make it easy to put on your baby. BumbleBeeBums also offers the option of snaps to make it even easier! I like using my snappi so I just got the Daddy Flat without snaps.

This is the inside of the Daddy Flat when it is all opened up. You can see how it is cut to be more of a diaper shape. The inside of the flat is bamboo fleece which is really absorbent! BumbleBeeBums also offers hemp fleece as an interior option, so if you want even more absorbency you can choose that.

On the back is the printed flannel fabric, which gives you an extra layer of absorbency.

To fold the Daddy Flat, fold the extra fabric over the middle as shown above. Then fold it back on itself as shown below.

This gives a total of six layers of fabric in the wet zone, three of which are bamboo fleece! Once it is folded like this it is ready to go on baby.

We got a really great fit with this diaper on Ava. At 31 inches and 26 pounds, Ava is tall and skinny so sometimes diapers are tricky to fit, but this one did great. We got a size large Daddy Flat and I just fold the rise down slightly to fit her. Bumblebeebum Diapers offers sized options for a trim fit, but I can see how even this large could fit a smaller baby if you just tweak the folding a little.

As you can see here, this is a very trim diaper. I was truly amazed by how absorbent it is!

This is the back of the Daddy Flat. Ava was really wiggling when I put it on, so one of the layers is peeking out! The great thing about flats though is that you just need to have it all under a cover, and it will work fine.

Overall we have really enjoyed this diaper. At $9 a piece, these are a really fun way to get some cute prints in your flats stash or try flats for the first time. I found that this was a really doable diaper for Daddy and others who help out with changes and it travels well in a diaper bag. One thing that I was pleasantly surprised by was how well this diaper contains poop! It seemed like every time Ava wore this diaper she pooped in it, but we never had poop go onto the cover! I think this is because the design of the wing tabs keeps the diaper snug around the legs really well. If you have been thinking about trying flats, these are a fun, customizable way to do so!

Check BumbleBeeBums out on FaceBook and on Etsy to see her fabulous creations!

Flats Challenge Day 7: What Did I Learn?

Today was the seventh day of the Dirty Diaper Laundry Flats and Handwashing Challenge. The challenge officially ends for the participants when we change our babies into their nighttime diaper. Ava is now down to sleep in her normal non-flats-challenge nighttime diaper and the last load of handwash flats and covers are hanging on the drying rack, so we have officially completed the 2013 Flats Challenge. This post is a recap of sorts, to look at what I learned from the challenge and think about flats as a diapering option.

Last flat of the challenge: a Rebourne Clothing birdseye flat folded in an Ava Fold.

The Flats Challenge seemed to go by really quickly for me. I felt like it made my week very busy, though that was more from blogging every day than from handwashing every day to be honest. I did a total of seven loads of handwashed diapers this past week, not counting wool wraps. By the third day of handwashing I felt like it had become more of a habit and less of a chore. There was something calming about taking that half an hour a day to wash diapers in the camp washer. It gave me a chance to think and zone out a little. I really liked the feeling of connection to my ancestors that I felt while handwashing. Even though it was hard work each and every time, and my hands and back are certainly sore, it is cool to know that if my family needed it I could do this to save us money.

The last load in the camp washer.

Learning to handwash flats gave me an opportunity to rethink both my cloth diaper stash and the way I wash them. After finding out how simple flats can be, I am going to be destashing most of my all-in-ones and pockets and using mainly prefolds and flats from now on. I also thought through how my diapers are washed in the wash machine and realized that if I switch completely to flats and prefolds I should be able to cut back quite a bit on the water and time that my washing machine uses to do a load of diapers.

The last load of the flats challenge hung up to dry.

I do think that using flats and covers is a very viable option for anyone who is struggling to diaper their child. Every baby deserves clean diapers and if cost is the struggle for a family, then cloth diapers just might be the solution. A family without a washing machine and without the finances for disposables could benefit hugely from information about using flats and handwashing them. I know it is work, but for us it really only added about 30-45 minutes of work to my day. If I ever found myself in a situation where handwashing was my only choice, I would do it gladly. Just knowing that my hard work would show up so tangibly as extra money in our budget would be the best motivation for me.

I think the thing to keep in mind with the different options for diapering is that your life and situation is unique to you. Your hard is hard. Whether you are saving your family money via a cloth stash of all-in-ones, or whether you find yourself needing to handwash a small stash of upcycled flats, we are all doing the best for our children and families. The important thing to take away from this week is that the option of cloth diapers CAN truly work for any family. We just need to advocate and get the information out there to the families who can be helped the most from it. Knowledge truly is power, and families can be freed from the burden of diaper need if they just have the right information and support.

Flats Challenge Day 6: The Ava Fold

Today was Day 6 of the Dirty Diaper Laundry Flats Challenge. I can't believe how fast this challenge has gone by! I told Ben today that I feel like I'm used to the hand washing routine now and if I needed to, I could totally hand wash on a permanent basis. Yes, it is hard work and it takes a half an hour of my day, but once you're used to the routine it is kind of a calming task. Today is an open topic day for the bloggers of the Flats Challenge, so I thought I would present a photo tutorial of a flat fold that I have created this week!

I really like most of the folds I have tried so far with Ava, but I have found that spraying poop off of most flat folds is a little annoying. A lot of the folds end up with fabric edges in the inside middle of the diaper, so when you have to spray off poop it is tricky to figure out where to hold the diaper to get the best spray angle. So when I started trying to design a fold I had two requirements: first, I wanted the section where poop will hit to be one smooth piece of fabric, and second I wanted to have some way of keeping poop inside the diaper so that I don't have to wash the cover every time Ava has a poopy diaper. After a lot of trial and error tonight, I came up with this fold that I think is a total winner! I hope others like it as much as I do. Let me know in the comments if anything is confusing and I will tweak the tutorial as needed.

The Ava Fold

First, start by making sure your flat is a square. Mine here is an Imagine Printed Flat and is slightly longer than it is wide, so I needed to fold down one end to get a square shape.

Next we are going to fold one corner in to the middle of the square. Before I started the Ava Fold, I folded this flat into fourths and pressed down to leave some crease marks as guidelines to help me find the middle.

In this next picture you can see some crease marks on each side of the corner that we just folded up. The sides are going to fold towards the center on these lines.

If you look at the bottom of the flat you can see that the crease is about halfway between the left side of the folded corner and the midpoint of the folded corner.

Fold the side over as shown in this next picture. The new fold line will angle out toward the top slightly.

Now fold the other side in towards the middle in the same way. You can see we've created a small triangle shape at the bottom, and the sides angle out toward the top. If you need to adjust the width of the diaper, just fold the sides in slightly more or slightly less.

Now fold the top point of the diaper down to almost meet the triangle space at the bottom. How far down you fold the top point will determine the rise of the diaper so just tweak this to fit your child.

When you first fold down the top point there will be an extra corner sticking out from the side of the diaper.

I just tucked this under to make the whole side a smooth line.

Now fold the sides in again and fan out the sides in the back. I had the sides meet in the middle to create another triangle shape, but you could overlap them if you prefer.

Then you place your baby on the flat and fold up the front of the diaper. You can see in this picture that the folded in sides have created a gusset to contain poop. When I put it on Ava I also folded the back down just a tiny bit to help with poop containment in the back also.

Then just wrap the wings around baby and fasten with a Snappi, Boingo, or pins and voila! You've folded the Ava Fold!

Here is a side shot to show how nice and trim this fold ended up being.

And a blurry back fold. It's hard to get a clear shot when your toddler won't stop dancing!

Here is the Ava Fold underneath a Blueberry Coverall.

And the side view with the Coverall on.

And that's the Ava Fold! 

A couple suggestions and tweaks for heavy wetters: I found a couple places in this fold where you can fold excess fabric more toward the middle to assist with a heavy wetting baby.

If you have a flat that is longer on one side and you need to fold some extra length over to make the square, set the folded over side as one of the sides of the first corner you fold upward. This adds two extra layers of fabric right into the wet zone area.

The other thing you can do is to fold a bit of the side corners inwards before folding each side in. You can see in this picture above the crease marks where the sides will be folded in. I simply folded a little of the corner over on each side. This adds an extra layer to the wet zone when the sides are folded in.

Flats Challenge Day 5: What's Working (And What's Not)

Day Five of the Dirty Diaper Laundry Flats and Handwashing Challenge is wrapping up now. I feel like I have settled in to the routine of handwashing, hang drying, and folding pretty well. I got the hand wash done today in 30 minutes and was excited that I have gotten so much faster at it! The first day I think it took me 50 minutes, but I've gotten more efficient each day, so getting down to a 30 minute time is awesome. Today the blog topic is all about what is working and what isn't.

Flats

To be honest, I love all of the flats I have been using. I was most skeptical about the Flour Sack Towels before the challenge started, but they have actually worked surprisingly well. I have several brands of birdseye cotton flats and they have all been working great too. The bamboo fleece flats from Sweet Bobbins have been great for overnight paired with a Geffen Baby hemp/cotton jersey flat. The bamboo terry squares from Orange Diaper Co have also been really great at night. I used the toddler sized one last night with the ODC bamboo fleece doublers and that combo worked great. 

Folds

I'm getting better at the Origami Fold, but I have learned not to use it if poop is imminent. 

 

I think my favorite fold is the Jo fold: it is easy to fold, goes on baby well, and has absorbency where I need it. The only issue I have had with the Jo fold is that it is trickier to use my diaper sprayer to get the poop off. All the edges of the flat end up in the middle so it takes longer to get it all off. I love using a pad folded flat in a GroVia or Flip cover. Actually the pad folded flat in a Flip cover is seriously making me reconsider my old style Bum Genius Elemental stash. Most of the other folds I have tried have been working really well. The only one that did not work was the Origami Fold for containing poop. This might be just because I didn't have it folded onto Ava snugly enough, but we had an unpleasant poop in crib experience yesterday due to an origami folded flat.

Pad Fold in a Flip - loving this combo!

Washing

Smaller loads are the key to successful hand washing in a bucket washer. The first day I washed seven flats and four covers and I really felt like that was too many for my bucket. Maybe if I had tried just washing those in the tub it would have worked better, but since then I have tried to make sure that I do no more than five flats in one bucket load. I have given up on my cracked bucket lid and have just been plunging the bucket without it. It's a little more splashy than I would like but it's been working ok. 

Overall

The Flats Challenge has been largely successful for us so far. It does take time each day to hand wash, hand dry, and fold, so some things around the house have slipped through the cracks. Sometimes hand washing your kid's diapers comes at the cost of knowing what dinner will be! I'm looking forward to the last two days of the challenge though and I am so glad I decided to take this on this year!

Episencial BabyTime

Episencial Bath and Body Products

My son breaks out from almost all types of lotions, soaps and sunscreens. He has super sensitive skin and we have tried so many different things to find out what works for us. I was given the opportunity to review some of Episencial's bath and body products and I was really impressed.

We were sent Sunggly Lotion (cherry scented) Peaceful Bubbles Bath(blueberry scented) and Cheeky Salve(raspberry scented). I was a little nervous at first with the scents because that seems to be a big trigger for his skin reactions but because it is all natural, we had none! He loved that he got to have "smelly" lotions and baths because he normally cannot! What I found incredible was that the scents are not made of parfums or fragrances but actual juice extracts.

As soon as we got the lotion out, we tried it on all of us! Nyla loved that it was girly and smelled like cherries. Kynlie just loves putting lotion on in general, but I loved that this was chemical free and made with mostly organic ingredients. When we put it on Lincoln, I tested it on a small area first and he had no reactions after an hour so he got to put some all over. At first he said it was "girlish" but he ended up loving that he got to use a scented lotion. It went on smooth and didn't leave any greasy feeling on your hands.

We use the Peaceful Bubble bath soap every bath time. It has a light blueberry scent and makes great bubbles! Again, I was really nervous to put Lincoln in it but after the lotion had good success, I figured the bubble bath had to be the same. The kids loved it! They kept commenting on how much they liked how their bath smelled and that they "felt cleaner with blueberry soap" haha! I loved that it didn't cause any redness or rash on Lincoln and that they all enjoyed it.

Even though it says unscented I think the cheeky salve smells so yummy! We used this in many different ways. For the most part, I keep it in my purse to use as a chapstick and to put on chapped cheeks. We have also tried it for diaper rashes. (I don't double dip! lol) You can also use it for cracked nipples when nursing as well as cradle cap and acne bumps. (After baby is born in November I hope to see how it works for those!)

It is a colorless butter and smooths on nicely. It is edible(just in case your two year old wants to have taste!) and can be used to prevent and protect from the elements!

Kynlie loves to put the Snuggly Lotion on her tummy... 

And her legs. 

Overall, I absolutely loved all three of these products. The best part was that Lincoln had no reactions at all to any of it. I also loved that the scents were made with juice extracts, not fragrances! How cool is that. I also think it is awesome that they make everything using solar power. This company is built on good values and their goal is to provide a safe product to families that is green and good for the environment. 

You can get your Episencial products HERE or at several different retailers nationwide!